Sunday, June 22, 2008

Monday, June 16, 2008

Growing up in a poor country, I was always inclined to think of environmentalists as morons. I was living in paradise, but struggling every day for education, healthcare and hot designer shit. I wish I could walk around cutting down the trees, emsaculating leopards and performing dental work on elephants all for some profitable chinese herbal tea. My family eventually settled on two incredibly environmentally unfriendly industries: garments and crab fishing, to give me my first taste of the good life. I had proven myself right, again.

Until I came to Hong Kong. Even I could see how often Nature had been raped to tame her rolling hills, sparkling waters and clear blue sky. The cock-shaped IFC 2 tower is a literal expression of what mankind has rammed down Nature's throat. Ofcourse I couldn't give two shits. I threw my starbucks paper cup right, I dropped my plastic bag left, I washed my shampoo down the sink and I kept my A/C on high sending sweet CFCs sky-ward.

The earthquakes and flooding changed all that. Suddenly my livelihood, capital markets, were threatened by an endless litany of environmental disasters. Earthquakes in China, floods in China, droughts in Pakistan, floods in Australia (which previously had droughts), floods in Iowa, storms in the North Sea. Even my favourite sushi fish - salmon, was not arriving bloody pink on my plate but instead turning upside down in the slightly warmer waters of Canada and Norway. So for the first time I thought about the environment.

I realised that environmental damage, committed in the name of progress, only ever hurts poor people. Peasants die in floods, peons die in shoddy high-rise collapses during earthquakes, beggars get lung cancer from air pollution. There is an endless, silent death toll in the name of progress. That's not even counting all the cuddly animals, fuck them. So I asked myself three very important questions:

1. How many people have to die before someone invents an environmentally sound system of economic development?

Sunday, June 15, 2008

"By the second week in September I reached the conclusion that a unversity education was meanigngless. I decided to think of it as a period of training in techniques for dealing with boredom. I had nothing I especially wanted to accomplish in society that would require me to abandon my studies straight away, and so I went to my lectures each day, took notes, and spent my free time in the library reading or looking things up." - Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Thursday, June 5, 2008

I eat breakfast three hundred yards away from four thousand hedge funds who are trained to pick me off. So don't think for one second that you can come down here, flash a client relationship, and make me nervous.

Son, we live in a world that has risks, and those risks have to be hedged by men like me. Who's gonna do it? You? The Sales Force? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for your client and curse the desk. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that your client's loss, while tragic, probably saved p&l. And that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves p&l. You don't want the truth - because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me in those screens.

You need me in those screens. We use words like roll-down, carry, gamma.

We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something.

You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very bonus pool that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I'd rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise, I'd suggest you pick up a prop book and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!